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Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SOCIAL ENGLAND. CHAPTER XVII. THE AGE OF WALl'OLE, 1714-1742; WITH SOME OF THE PREPARATIONS FOR IT. The history, whether political or social, of the eighteenth century in England cannot possibly be summed up under any one descriptive formula. Were we to restrict our survey to the h'rst half of its course, we should certainly be disposed to pronounce it as on the whole a stationary era in our domestic history. In politics alone are there any discernible signs of advance. Here the work of the Revolution was being slowly completed and consolidated; the modern constitutional system was accumulating its precedents; and the power which a change of dynasty had thrown into the hands of one of the two great political parties was slowly dying of its own abuses. Events were leading, step by step, to the overthrow of that oligarchy which the Whigs had built up on the site, and largely with the materials, of the demolished edifice of Stuart rule; and the ground was being steadily prepared for that re-erection of the constitutional fabric on a broader and more popular basis which, but for the panic engendered by the French earthquake?a phenomenon always discouraging to builders ?would probably have been accomplished before the century closed. But in most other departments of the national life we shall find, in the earlier part of the century, few signs of active growth. The philosophic thought of the age was mainly critical and destructive; religious sentiment throughout the first half of the century was dormant or declining; art during the same period has no triumphs to record; and B Vol.. V. though prose literature indeed throve vigorously, the poetic spirit waned almost to the point of extinction. We have to wait till the century has run more than half its cour.se before ...
| ISBN-13 | 9780217049085 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10 | 0217049087 |
| Weight | 1.98 Pounds |
| Dimensions | 9.00 x 6.00 x 1.37 In |
| List Price | $33.86 |
| Format | Paperback |
|---|---|
| Pages | 618 pages |
| Publisher | |
| Published On | 2009-08-01 |
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